1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of surgery, and more particularly, it relates to apparatus or devices used for irrigating wounds and the like in medical procedures.
2. Description of Prior Art
It is necessary at times during the performance of surgery by medical professionals for wounds to be cleaned of accumulated blood and foreign debris such as particles of clothing, dirt and other undesired materials. The cleaning of these wounds has been accomplished through the use of irrigating devices. One well known irrigating device is a simple bulb syringe, which syringe may include check valves. The bulb syringe is filled from a basin containing the desired sterile liquid to be employed for washing or irrigating in cleaning the wound. The bulb syringe has serious disadvantages' in that (1) it must be filled repeatedly during use from a basin which has the sterile liquid exposed to the atmosphere of the surroundings (2) it contains a small liquid volume and (3) can be dropped easily during use. Improvements have been proposed to the simple disposable bulb syringe in its being combined with a reservoir containing the sterile liquid to be used for washing and cleaning the wound. Various types of combinations of a bulb syringe and a liquid reservoir or vessel have been proposed. None of these improved devices has found full acceptance by the medical profession because of various problems with them. The improved syringes, although manually operable, do not allow the user to initiate gently and direct positively any desired liquid volume and stream intensity into the wound. It is difficult to design one syringe arrangement which is easy to control by hand operation of a desired stream volume and intensity.
Many syringe devices have been used for irrigating wounds because they could be made for one use and disposal of inexpensive and easily formed plastic materials, sterilized and then retained in such sterile form until ready to use. However, electric, pneumatic or hydraulic driven pumping systems have been designed where the user may activate, as for example by a push button or the like, a hand held nozzle assembly to control the delivery of a pressurized stream of sterile liquid onto the wound. These devices are very expensive to manufacture and use. They are difficult to clean after use so that they may be returned into a sterile condition for the next usage. In many cases, the medical profession has preferred the disposable, hand held simple syringe and a basin containing liquid for cleaning wounds with a washing liquid.
The present invention is a medical irrigation device, which combines the ready to use and inexpensive disposable features of the simple bulb syringe with the great utility in delivery of volumes of sterile fluids provided by the motor driven irrigating devices of the more sophisticated nature discussed above. In particular the present medical irrigating device is of a very unique design, constructed of plastic components that are inexpensive to fabricate and assemble, and further capable of providing selectively the desired liquid volume and intensity of stream from a hand held syringe but yet without the undesired features of the simple plastic bulb syringe and basin arrangement. In addition, this new medical irrigation device can be readily maintained sterile within its wrappings until desired to be used when it is filled with the sterile liquid to be used in cleaning the wound. Then, the device is ready to use by simple manual manipulations of hand held syringes. In addition, this device can be used with a plurality of syringes by several medical professionals where the washing of the wound requires a relatively large volume of carefully directed and controlled washing liquid streams.